Against her will, Twilight finds herself randomly transported across two worlds. One is the Equestria she knows and loves. Another is an Equestria devoid of life that exists in only ruins and shadow. Determined to prevent her Equestria from meeting the same fate, she searches for the cause of the calamity that devastated the other side. Disturbingly lucid dreams haunt her nights, and events around her cause to question that if her quest for the truth will save her world, or in turn create the disaster she seeks to avoid ...
Chapters (2)
So here is the fruits of my labor, my first Pony fic, and my first serious attempt at writing in a *very* long time. I am pretty happy with how these turned out, but if there are any serious flaws, I am willing to revise the already posted chapters.
I'll probably post author notes as a blog post and put the link here.
Awesome start. Can't wait to see more
Not sure what to make of this yet, but it does seem like a promising start. I'll track.
Agreed with oblivion2k, awesome job and I hope to see more. You did a great job on the first chapter with the horror without going overboard, and this chapter was just as well done. Celestia might have been a bit out of character but that's understandable given how Twilight has suddenly disappeared like she did, with Celestia for once having no idea on what's happened.
And I actually liked how you showed the bond between the two and how it was affecting Celestia.
149529
Writing Celestia believably has proven to be possibly one of the hardest things I've done thus far. With the exception of 'Return of Harmony', there has been very little showing her in a position where she is powerless, so its a lot of guesswork and thought to try and do it without breaking immersion and characterization. With Discord, she was at least aware of what was going on, and had plans to combat it.
When I initially wrote the chapter, Celestia was to only appear at the very end of the scene in the library (we would have followed Spike's POV with finding the remaining Mane Six). After about three days of trying to make it work, I gave up, and Celestia became the focus of that scene instead.
Chapter 2 went through about five rewrites of those scenes specifically because of issues with characterization.
I like the concept you're working with; the mystery of the 1st person, dream sections is rather nicely done (I'm admittedly a bit torn between thinking that Twi is being sent forward in time and being sent to an actual alternate universe... apparently pegasus Celly and unicorn Luna make it so). This is just the beginning, so it still seems as though you are in set-up mode here... especially since the story has yet to own up to its synopsis (and will fail to do so until Twilight gets through a full cycle of being yoinked into the alternaverse, let back into her own before being yoinked again... so likely another chapter or so before you've got it meshing with its synopsis).
As for other things... well, you do a pretty good job with the shock and despair that both Twilight and Celestia are working through when you've got them contending with the nightmare. Twilight, however, seems to lack some characterization (she's seems more like a lens through which we're experiences the alternaverse rather than a character) and Celestia does seem a bit on the OoC side (I can see her panicking, but I dunno so much about her being quite this desperate; of course, Celly only has so much characterization in the series so I dunno if I can really tag her as OoC anyways). The more minor characters, including the rest of the main six and Spike, all seem somewhat lacking in characterization. We spend very little time with them (and, by your character tags, I'll assume this is by design) and they kind of read in places like cardboard representations of themselves... okay, that was a bit harsher sounding than I mean, but that sort of analogy is what I mean.
On the mechanical side of things, you've got quite a lot of typos and grammatical quirks throughout these chapters, so you might look to give this a thorough scrubbing in the future. Some of these are distracting themselves and they do end up distracting a bit as they accumulate.
Anyways, not a bad start. I do look forward to seeing this live up to the promise of the ideas set forth here.
Nice work,
Lammy